How Particle Physics is Ruining Your Netflix Experience

According to a Swiss research team, your Netflix queue may have more to do with physics than it does personal recommendations or anything else. This is mostly due to the algorithms in the system, which create biases based on previous movies which may have a high amount of views simply because of people's tendency to take a chance on movies that look terrible. Well, that explains why ‘The Expendables’ keeps showing up on our queue.

Researchers say that particle physics, specifically quark fundamentals, is responsible for those crappy movie recommendations that keeping rearing their ugly heads in your top 10, embarrassing you during couch dates with babes. It’s a phenomenon similar to what would happen if everyone bought the same guidebook and decided to take a vacation at the same quiet beach; the beach would no longer be quiet, says Stanislao Gualdi, lead researcher from the University of Fribourg.

In the case of Netflix and other services of its kind, if these systems would limit the number of people that can watch a particular movie at one time, this would force other films into a secondary recommendation status. This would ultimately help to eliminate some of the biases that are manifested from giving everyone non-restrictive access to the exact same thing.

“Crowd-avoidance can be applied to ﬁnd a good compromise between satisfying the preferences of users and distributing them among objects evenly,” say the study authors.

Yet, scientists say that implementing this type of model is not a lucrative approach for companies like Netflix, because it is not necessarily a means to increased profitability. Loosely translated: 'Jersey Shore Shark Attack' is probably in queue to stay, so just watch it already.